Everyone was feeling a little frayed. That was what she had to keep reminding herself. It was just the stress getting to her. Her eyes still half closed, her lashes clouding her vision, Nikki noticed movement outside.
Kurt Cox had wandered out onto the deck and, unaware that anyone was watching, had stopped, dropped his towel, slipped off his robe and stepped out of the Home monogrammed sheepskin slippers – to reveal a pair of terrible knee-length Bermuda swimming shorts. Carefully, with his feet, Kurt arranged his discarded slippers so they were precisely aligned. Then he placed his neatly folded towel and robe next to them on a wooden bench.
Nikki allowed herself a gentle smile.
It was then she noticed Kurt’s tattoo – just one, unusual for someone of his age in his line of work, in her experience: his parents’ initials, RC and MC, in copperplate – on his shoulder blade. Directly underneath it, a large darker patch of skin which the script wrapped around. The same kind of dark brown patch crept around his left shin.
‘Hey, are you okay?’ asked the therapist. ‘Pressure too firm?’
‘No, no. Keep going, I’m fine,’ Nikki answered.
It wasn’t the firmness of the massage that had caused her to gasp, or set the tears quivering in her eyes.
Jess
When you had worked in hotels for as long as Jess had, after a while you got used to how thoughtless people could be. How weird. How disgusting. It wasn’t designed to give you a rosy view of human nature, witnessing morning after morning the sorts of things some guests thought it was okay to expect somebody else to clean up.
She had never seen anything like this.
It wasn’t long after everyone had departed on a yacht trip around the island – the very first official event of the launch party weekend – that the call had come in, something about an incident in cabin ten.
‘An incident?’ she had asked.
‘You’re going to need to come and see this for yourself,’ they’d told her.
They were not joking.
When she got to cabin ten, two of her team were standing outside on the wooden veranda, next to the stand of upturned pristine navy blue wellington boots, looking faintly shell-shocked. One of them – Bex – was a local girl from Littlesea. They had spoken yesterday in the staff room, and Bex had said something about how keen her boyfriend was to get a job here （he was going to keep applying; he worked in the kitchen of the other pub in the village）。 The other, Ella, was an old Home hand who had spent three years at Highland Home, then a year with the company in London. She’d been one of the girls with a question about changing her rota. The closer Jess got, the more upset they looked. Bex was blowing her nose into a little scrap of tissue. Ella was shaking her head, muttering, pacing up and down the deck.
‘Everything all right?’ she asked.
Neither seemed to know quite how to answer.
Once glance inside cabin ten and Jess did not blame them.
The place looked like a crime scene.
‘It’s okay, guys,’ Jess told them. ‘You did the right thing, calling me. We’ll sort this out.’
Picking her way carefully around the broken glass in the hallway, she made her way towards the living room.
All the bedding was in the bath, completely soaked. The mattress, also sodden, was on the back terrace. Half the antique books that had been on the bookshelf were now in the middle of the floor, shredded; the rest were in the log-burner, scorched and ruined. None of the lights came on when you tried the switch. This turned out to be because all the light bulbs were on the bathroom floor, ground to shards and powder.
‘My God,’ she said out loud.
Although the members would likely not realize this, not all of the cabins had been created equal on Island Home. There was a distinct variation not only in their size – number five was about half as large again as the cabin allocated to Kyra and Lyra, with two extra bedrooms and a balcony at least twice the size – but also in the private amenities associated with them. Cabin ten, for instance, had an outdoor fireplace, sunken lounge and copper bathtub, as well as its own hedge-enclosed rose garden with a private beach at the end of it. It was by some distance, in every respect, the most impressive of all the island’s accommodation.